NEW DELHI: Over 100 monkeys died after allegedly inhaling a pesticide sprayed in a Food Corporation of India (FCI) warehouse and were then secretly buried in a pit by warehouse workers to conceal the incident.
The tragic discovery came to light when the buried carcasses were exhumed on Friday by a team of veterinarians for postmortem.
Circle Officer (CO) Yogendra Krishna Narayan said that police were first alerted to the deaths on Wednesday and have since registered a case against FCI employees while launching a full-scale investigation.
The pesticide, identified as aluminium phosphide, was sprayed on wheat sacks in the FCI godown on November 7 to protect the grain from insects and rodents.
According to police, a troop of monkeys entered the warehouse through a broken window that night, inadvertently inhaling the toxic gas.
When workers reopened the warehouse on November 9, several monkeys lay dead. Instead of reporting the deaths to higher authorities, the workers allegedly chose to bury the bodies in a nearby pit in an attempt to cover up the incident.
The incident came to light after members of the Vishva Hindu Parishad raised concerns after learning about the mass burial.
This is not the first time such an incident has been reported. Last year, carcasses of nearly 100 monkeys were discovered on the outskirts of a village in Telangana’s Siddipet district. Officials suspected that the monkeys had been poisoned elsewhere, with their bodies later dumped in the area.